Part 10 (2/2)
Meanwhile, Abbe Mignot and Mother Rosalie continued happy in their music and their friends.h.i.+p. I never knew Mother Rosalie, and will not invent a psychology for her. We exchanged a few words on several occasions, and I received the impression of a remarkably refined nature. Whatever I might say beyond this would be drawn from my imagination. With regard to the Abbe, the reader is as well qualified to judge him as I. Bound over to continence by an adept in the reverse, he resigned himself to inevitable fate, the cruelty of which he had recognized when it was too late.
Heaven, chance, or destiny had thrown a friendly soul in his path, a prisoner of the same destiny. He surrendered to the delight of the a.s.sociation, happy to come out of himself, to give a little of his life, to receive something of a human life in return, and to feel his pleasure shared. They did not conceal themselves, having nothing to conceal. This seemed to them a safeguard, under the eyes of their brothers in humanity.
The ”scandal” lasted three months. One fine day, without warning, an elderly, hunchbacked Sister descended from the coach, and having entered the hospital, exhibited, along with her t.i.tles as the new ”Mother,” the order to ”Sister Rosalie” to return _within the hour_ to the convent.
Sister Rosalie bowed her head in submission, asked whether time would be allowed her for one leave-taking, and upon receiving a negative answer, retired to her chamber, ”to pray and to obey.” She came out with faltering steps, and departed never to return.
The following day was Sunday. The event had been kept secret for the sake of a more dramatic climax. When the priest, coming before the altar, met the shock of the sardonic joy twisting the lips of the hunchbacked Mother and her three acolytes in the charity of the Lord, he fell a step backward, as if mocked by Satan himself. Pale, shaken, he was unable to restrain the trembling of his lips. The thunderbolt had struck. In the anguish of death he retained the appearance of life, and must play the part of a living man. By an heroic effort he regained self command. Violently the _Introit_ rang out, as if from depths beyond the grave, and in it were mingled the tragedy of the man and of the G.o.d.
There was but one word at the end of ma.s.s:
”_Monsieur le cure_ made the pretty Mother sing too much. She has gone away to rest.”
Last month I met Abbe Mignot out among the rocks of Deux Fontaines. He sat with knitted brows at the foot of a bush, and nervously turned the pages of his breviary. He was evidently making a desperate effort to fasten down his wandering attention. He did not notice me, and had not my dog run up to him, I should have turned and walked away, to avoid disturbing him in his lonely struggle. When he saw me he rose, afraid of having been caught betraying something of himself. I held out my hand in friends.h.i.+p, and this time I would gladly have stopped for a talk had I not seemed to read in his eyes an entreaty to pa.s.s on without speaking. I obeyed the silent appeal. But yielding to an obscure need--
”_Monsieur le cure_,” I said, ”you ought to be careful. There are snakes among those stones. You must have been warned before?”
”Yes, I know,” he answered in a m.u.f.fled voice. ”This place is infested with vipers--most pernicious beasts, _Monsieur_. I hope that on your side you will be able to guard against them.”
XIII
MASTER BAPTIST, JUDGE
What kind of justice did Saint Louis dispense under his oak tree?
History does not tell us that he was a doctor of law. Everything leads us to suppose that he owed extremely little if anything at all to Papinian, Ulpian, or Tribonian. He was, of course, a Saint, and those among us chosen by Providence to make Its Supreme Will known receive appropriate inspiration from on high. King Solomon, like other Asiatic kings, who are by their people regarded as mouthpieces of divine wisdom, consulted no text when he spoke the famous judgment upon which his glory still rests.
Jews or Christians, the ancient leaders of the people judged in equity, and without too great difficulty arrived at an approximate justice, superior to the ”judgments of G.o.d,” which had too often what looked like the iniquitous unfairness of chance. Codes, by their inflexible rules applied to every case, have overthrown the ancient order, under which an arbitrary procedure fitted the law to each individual transgression.
Laws and judges have since become more flexible, they would otherwise be intolerable, but they are still too rigid to bend felicitously to the modifications by which natural right might be promoted. In addition to which, gratuitous ”justice” not infrequently ruins the person seeking it.
For all these reasons--fear of the law, which pounces upon poor people they know not whence, fear of the hardened judge who refers the case to his learning rather than to his conscience--our peasants in Western France with difficulty make up their minds to set in motion the so-called ”protective” machinery of the law. Even the settlement of a dispute before a justice of the peace seems an extreme measure, and they have recourse to it only under great stress, which is a matter for rejoicing, for such is the ”social order,” that without this fortunate tendency, mankind, being entirely composed of people who complain, or have reason to complain, law courts would need to be made big enough to accommodate the entire human race.
In the country, sources of disagreement abound. The limb of a tree stretching beyond a fixed boundary, a vagrant root, a fruit dropping on the wrong side of a hedge, the use of a stream, a right of way, may bring up interpretations of customs giving to conflicting interests occasion for dispute. Before coming to the last expedient of going to law, quarrels, insults, and blows perform their office of preparing the way for reconciliation, which eventually results from nervous or muscular exhaustion. A good hand-to-hand fight would const.i.tute a ”judgment of G.o.d” not without its merits, but for the temptation to ”appeal” by nocturnal reprisals on innocent crops.
All that might take one very far. Which is the reason why we often find in country districts certain natural-born arbiters, who bear the same relation to judges that sorcerers do to doctors. The judge is the Hippocrates of social maladies, even as the physician is the judge of physiological disorders. The power to judge and the power to heal are acquired by some mysterious method concerning which rustic clients and patients have very misty notions. Judge and physician often make mistakes, and these create in men's minds a dismay greater than the comfort induced by their most authentic successes.
Is even learning absolutely necessary to make one competent to judge and to heal? In olden days this ability was a gift from heaven, a matter exclusively of divine inspiration, which invested a man with the requisite faculties. Why should it no longer be the same? The peasant's slow wit still clings to the old conceptions and retains the imprint of past beliefs. He therefore prefers the wizard to the doctor, whom science has stripped of the prestige of mysteriousness. In the same way, he prefers--rather than to seek advice from competent sources--to consult concerning his rights, or the conduct of his affairs, one of his own sort, totally ignorant, and playing the part of doctor of law from inspiration.
I once knew, long, long ago, alas, one of these improvised Solomons, whose reputation for legal knowledge had spread from parish to parish over a considerable area of the Woodland of the Vendee. Baptist Merian, better known by the name of Master Baptist, was a peasant of uncouth appearance, who personally looked after the property apportioned to him by heaven and the inheritance laws. He was a big fellow whose once-powerful muscles were becoming overlaid with fat as he neared his seventieth year, the period when I first happened upon him in the exercise of his functions. His purplish, pockmarked face very nearly concealed in its fleshy folds two small gray eyes which pierced an interlocutor directly through. He had a voice of thunder, and the gestures of a thunderer. He had the imposing utterance of one pa.s.sing absolute judgments on men and things. He was like Zeus whose frown shook Olympus, when he gave orders to take the mare to pasture or harness the oxen to the plough. And yet he was at bottom a timorous spirit, very attentive to the suggestions of prudence, and careful never to push any matter to a violent issue.
His adversary, whoever contradicted him, was generally called a ”blockhead,” and when Master Baptist had thus p.r.o.nounced himself nothing remained for the sentenced one but to bow his head in silence, which was what all around him were in the habit of doing. No one could have told whence he derived his legal authority. He made no claim to anything so contemptible as a knowledge of the law, for he could scarcely read, and with difficulty could sign his name. He was none too pleasant a neighbour, and had on various occasions started lawsuits which he had wisely brought to a close by a more or less advantageous settlement, giving as his reason that the judge in his opinion was a ”blockhead.”
The consideration he enjoyed was not lessened by this, for he continued to speak of his litigations as if he had won his cases; it was even noticeable that the magistrate who had earned that unpleasant epithet from his client lost, to a certain extent, the respect in which the community had held him.
Master Baptist was not one of those geniuses who need to blow their horn. Respectful of everybody's right to manage his own affairs, he never ventured to offer advice to any one. At the most, if he saw a field which did not carry out his idea of a proper rotation of crops, or a field badly fenced, or an animal in poor condition, he would express his view that the owner was a ”blockhead,” and public opinion could do nothing but record the condemnation, from which there was no appeal. Far from protesting against Master Baptist's uniform verdicts, people would at the least disagreement, the first difficulty, come running to him to explain their case, inquire what their chances were of success, and often beg him to arbitrate.
With great dignity, with benevolence, even, he would receive these visitors--if it were winter, by the hearth in the kitchen, which is the countryman's parlour; if warm weather, by the house door, a few feet from the black drain into which the sink emptied the odoriferous extract of culinary operations. Comfortably seated in a quaint semicircular armchair, the wool-stuffed cus.h.i.+on of which was covered with ticking, he would listen to the men who had come to consult him and who remained standing, cap in hand, while they told their interminable and tangled stories. When they stopped for lack of breath, Master Baptist would ask questions, which usually called forth prolix replies. Finally he would speak:
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